


you can't have your sweater back

by icarxs



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Multi, anyway they were all dating, this is very short sorry about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7639624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarxs/pseuds/icarxs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>of the three of them, it was only her who could still see the sky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can't have your sweater back

**Author's Note:**

> this fandom is so small it makes me cry.
> 
> I'm hoping in writing this fic I will exorcise some of the grief that has stuck with me since reaching the end of All Clear. It probably won't, though.
> 
> (title is from Siken - I don't blame you for being dead, but-)

Being under the green grass of Oxford was better than the rubble of Fleet Street, Polly supposed, but that didn’t seem like much of a comfort when he was 24 and had died so close to home, shipwrecked, saved.

The arches of Balliol towered high above. Polly sat with her back against the crumbling headstone of some poor sucker who had died sometime in the 20th century - though years were swiftly meaning nothing to her anymore - and sat with her cheek on her knees, her face soft, her knees chapped. The ground was dry and cracked from the heat. It was an old graveyard, not one that had been used in the Pandemic, but even so it was full. Oxford was old. The dead were a multitude.

Technically Mike’s grave was months old. The earth was speckled with grass growing through, and someone had left flowers - not her. She wondered who. HIs family had been and gone long before she’d come through the drop; perhaps his roommate, driven by some sort of mixture of pity and at least that wasn’t me, had picked them up from one of the many markets throughout the city and dropped them off on his way home for the vac. Polly wasn’t sure what ‘home’ meant anymore.

She had been back in Oxford a week and the rumble of cars still set her teeth on edge. Sometimes a bird would fly low overhead and she would flinch back into the nearest doorway, waiting for the crump of the bomb. Enclosed spaces forced tightness into her chest like ash and Starbucks was intolerable, and every day she turned a corner and expected sirens, and every morning she woke up and was surprised by the sunlight streaming through the window of her college room, by the softness of her duvet, by the sleek thin vibration of her phone.

In Oxford it was summer. She was wearing denim shorts and the sight of so much of her own skin, pale flashes, was strange and unfamiliar; in the mirror her lips without the scarlet lipstick seemed insignificant, the colour of sunrise clouds, frosted flowers. The time lag wasn’t bad; this wasn’t time lag. It was displacement.

The night before, Colin had brushed his mouth over hers, tentative as a moth, and she had pressed him into the wall of the college and felt the crumbling bricks under her palms. He had tasted like modernity and change, like the beer he’d had, like her own tongue. She remembered when they’d fallen up the emergency staircase one night, Oxford Circus, Eileen’s bubble of laughter in her ear, the satisfying pain of the handrail in the small of her back, Mike’s hands on her waist, insistent and certain of her, of her skin, of the ground underneath them, of Eileen and the bombs and nothing else. Colin was different to that. It was a good difference.

The grave in front of her had sharp letters chiselled into it, like teeth marks.

_MICHAEL DAVIES_  
5TH APRIL 2036 - 19TH APRIL 2060  
“THE NOBLE MAN SHOULD EITHER LIVE WITH HONOUR OR DIE WITH HONOUR. THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO BE SAID.”

Sophocles - that wasn’t Mike’s choice, more likely Colin’s, but it seemed to suit. Polly was certain some historian - a man, obviously, because it was rare that a century before the middle ages was safe for women - had met the playwright himself and declared him an unconscionable bore, but even so. Polly stretched her legs out in front of her until they were touching the base of the grave. Her toenails were painted a pale pink; her sandals were the colour of an oak tree trunk, of autumn leaves, of the specific brown russet of Mrs Laburnum’s skirt that early morning in Notting Hill Gate. Polly hadn’t looked them up; she didn’t want to know whether they’d got out of London, or whether they’d been hit by an incendiary on their way to work. Even Godfrey was an unknown now. Eileen, she knew, had lived well into the 1980s. The idea that somewhere she, too, was mouldering under the grounds, that worms had long established mansions in the soft curve of her pelvis, was almost too much for Polly to bear. Of the three of them, it was only her who could still see the sky.

Most people seemed to talk when they went to visit graves - she knew Colin could spend hours by the grave of his Aunt, legs crossed like the school boy he should still be, rambling away, chin cupped in hand - but this didn’t feel like Michael. There was no second rush of grief. He had died in 1940, Fleet Street, burnt passport, abandoned coat, Eileen’s pale face at the bottom of the escalator. The bloodstains on the floor of the drop that they still hadn’t managed to scrub clean were connected to the concept of Mike only vaguely, even though, now, horribly, she recognised his face in her memory, twisting up with pain, the slickness under her fingers as she tied the tourniquet, the unbalanced oddness of his absent foot and Fairchild heading for the ambulance. If only she’d known then. Maybe it was better that she hadn’t known then.

The flowers seemed more suited to Eileen than Mike, and Polly nudged at them with her toes, companionably, and closed her eyes against the uneasy heat of the sun. She fell asleep there for a long while, under the Oxford sunshine, in the Oxford breeze, no bombs, lulled by the security and by her newfound, London-born talent to sleep anywhere, and woke with her skin flushed and burnt, and felt a little better about it all.


End file.
